Von Trapps Are Reunited, Without the Singing

Sam von Trapp, the grandson of Maria, the singing nun made famous by “The Sound of Music,” is taking over the legacy of a family that has had its share of ups and downs.

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

STOWE, Vt. — When Sam von Trapp, the grandson of Maria, the singing nun made famous by “The Sound of Music,” graduated from college, his father offered him a deal: Sam could do whatever he wanted for 10 years before he had to return home here to run the family’s ski lodge.

His father started calling him to come home after six years.

When Mr. von Trapp finally returned to take over from his father, Johannes, he had had quite a decade: teaching skiing in Aspen, modeling for Ralph Lauren, surfing in Chile and even making People magazine’s America’s Top 50 Bachelors list in 2001. Recently, he sat in a dark office at the Trapp Family Lodge, the inn his grandmother started, trying to decide what to do with some old curtains.

It is hard for anyone to untangle family history and allegiances during the holidays. When your last name is von Trapp, and Americans claim you as part of their own legacy, that task is just that much harder.

That legacy weighs on Mr. von Trapp even as he considers something as mundane as curtains.

In “The Sound of Music,” the beloved 1965 movie, Maria, the governess played by Julie Andrews, turned old curtains into play clothes for the seven von Trapp children, just as the real Maria had done. Mr. von Trapp figured that if he sold von Trapp draperies on eBay, he might turn a nice little profit.

“Nobody has the level of commitment I do,” said Mr. von Trapp, now 36, but with the energy and earnestness of a teenager. “Nobody has as much to gain.”

Despite the nostalgic mist around “The Sound of Music," Mr. von Trapp is taking over a business for a family that has had its share of ups and downs and disagreements.

When the von Trapps arrived in the United States in 1938, they settled in Pennsylvania and made money by singing baroque and folk music. By 1942, the family had bought a farm in Stowe. Maria rented out rooms in the house when the von Trapps were on tour singing.

Still, Johannes von Trapp, the 10th and youngest child, remembers growing up relatively anonymously in a quiet, strict home. That began to shift after the 1959 Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” and when the movie opened, everything changed.

“You could no longer give your name anywhere without people saying ‘Oh, are you ... ?’ ” said the elder Mr. von Trapp, now 69. “The film, for better or for worse, made us a mass market commodity.”

The von Trapps have never directly profited from the film or Broadway musical: Maria, whose husband died in 1947, sold the rights to the family story to a German film company in the mid-1950s for just $9,000. Johannes and now his son run the cross-country skiing lodge that trades on the family’s fame with Austrian food, waitresses wearing dirndls and pictures of the family, but not a single poster from the movie.

“ ‘The Sound of Music’ was great, but it was an American version of my family’s life,” said Johannes, who no longer sings, although he still has a pleasant, reedy bass voice. “It wasn’t what we were. I just got tired of being cast as a ‘Sound of Music’ person.”

The family legacy has been particularly onerous for him.

People would ask about Liesl, and he would have to point out that his eldest sibling was not 16 going on 17, but 54 in 1965 — and male. They would ask whether he was Kurt or Friedrich, and he would have to explain that his father and mother had three children together that were not portrayed in the movie, and he was the youngest. His mother was presented as a near-saint in the movie; in real life, she was difficult and domineering, people who knew her said.

By 1969, he had graduated from Dartmouth, completed a master’s degree from the Yale school of forestry and was planning on an academic career in natural resources. He returned to Stowe to put the inn’s finances in order, and ended up running the place. He tried to leave, moving to a ranch in British Columbia in 1977 and staying a few years, then moving to a ranch in Montana. But the professional management in Stowe kept quitting. “Now I’m stuck here,” he said.

As long as Maria was alive, the von Trapp siblings grudgingly got along.

“She was a very strong minded, strong willed woman,” said Marshall Faye, a baker who has worked at the lodge for more than 30 years. “She ruled the family. Anything they did had to have her blessing.”

But after she died in 1987, the family members — 32 of whom owned stock in the lodge — started to fracture. Johannes engineered a buyout in 1994 and resolved a lawsuit with relatives in 1999. “I honestly resented the fact that none of my older siblings could’ve took over the business,” he said. “Then I could’ve run off and done whatever I wanted to do.”

If he had to run a lodge, he wanted a quiet, dignified one. He enjoys events like the Friday night wine tastings, where he can sip Grüner Veltliners and greet guests in the patrician fashion he learned as a boy.

But in the off season, the “Sound of Music” bus tours arrive, full of seniors who line their purses with cellophane so they can stuff them with Austrian pastries at the breakfast buffet. He recently discovered that his gift shop had been selling a stuffed goat that sings “The Lonely Goatherd.”

“Isn’t that awful?” he said, sighing. “My staff hid it from me for months. But it does sell.”

Since the buyout, the lodge has been profitable, if not enormously so, he said. It provides well for his family — his wife, Lynne, whom he met when she was a singing waitress at the lodge, and his children, Sam and Kristina, 38, who recently moved back to Stowe and built a house on the 2,400-acre property.

For Sam, a generation removed from “The Sound of Music,” the burden of being a von Trapp is lighter. He has seen the movie only twice, and is the child of a Vermonter, not the son of an Austrian baron. "For him, there were all those issues in the family, too, that came along with that little leap into fame," Sam said of his father.

Since his return, the younger Mr. von Trapp has made snow making his big project, spending nights on the snow-covered meadows in 10-degree weather, doing the heavy manual work it requires. He plans to bring back holiday singalongs and to advertise the lodge during ABC’s broadcast of “The Sound of Music” on Sunday, which his father once opposed.

The movie is “one of the reasons — the big one — that people come here,” said Ron Tanner, a marketing consultant who works at the lodge. “The TV ad will be to say, ‘Hey, the next generation has taken over the Trapp Family Lodge.’ ”

Early on a Friday night, Johannes slipped into the bar and ordered a glass of blaufränkisch, an Austrian red wine, and a hamburger without a bun.

The piano player, John Cassel, was playing a different song for each regular visitor. He plays Scott Joplin’s “Solace” for Sam, and pieces by the Cuban singer Silvio Rodriguez for Sam’s fiancée, Elisa. Johannes’s song is “Desperado,” the Eagles’ ballad.

“It’s very rewarding when you see a lounge full of happy people and a pianist plays someone’s song, my song,” Johannes said.

With Sam taking over, “I’ll get back to Montana,” he said. “I’ve sort of done my thing here. Now it’s up to my son to take it from here.”

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